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March 2017

Mar 27, 2017

As I wrote the Zedboard Chronicles - Episode One blog last week, I was struck with the notion that it was often difficult to convey information about the debug environment I was using. Although the pictures in the blog did convey some information, they didn’t convey the power and insight that the SourcePoint debugger can offer a developer when dealing with the Zynq 7000 SoC from Xilinx. The hardware platform is so powerful and configurable, with multiplexed IO, and embedded controllers that help with device management tasks. All this provides great flexibility, but with flexibility comes complexity, as highlighted when you simply read the Technical Reference Manual.

So, I decided to create a video blog or “Vblog” about my adventures into understanding this unique SoC. We have all heard that “A picture is worth a thousand words.” So, I asked my son in jest, “If a picture is worth a thousand words, what is a video worth?” Without missing a beat, his response was “How long is the video and what was the frame rate?” My response was “The video is about four and one half minutes at a frame rate of 24fps.” He quickly responded “6,480 frames or 6,480,000 words.” College students are so plugged into video media today!

With that information, I produced a video chronicle, one of many to come, and the video covers booting the Zedboard and connecting the SourcePoint debugger for ARM. Gaining independent control of each of the Cortex-A9 cores and examining the JTAG slave reset software is on the video.

Mar 15, 2017

I was challenged by my colleague, Alan Sguigna, author of The Minnowboard Chronicles, to write about my experiences with the Zedboard. We recently purchased a Zedboard from AVNET to better understand the capabilities of the SoC. The Zynq is unique in that not only does it contain a dual-core ARM® Cortex™ A-9, referred to as the processing system (PS), but also the Xilinx programmable logic (PL).

It is one thing to read the marketing or technical data from a website, but it is a whole lot more fun to get your hands on the real thing.

Mar 09, 2017

I spent the past two days at the Open Compute Project (OCP) U.S. Summit 2017, in Santa Clara, California. The HUGE news is that Microsoft has ported Windows Server to ARMv8 chips from Qualcomm and Cavium (but, for now, only for use within Azure).